


Last Call

by viewingcutscene



Series: A Very Talon Christmas [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Christmas Eve, F/F, M/M, Post-Reflections, Talon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9239351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viewingcutscene/pseuds/viewingcutscene
Summary: "Why is Sombra in a bar with a dead-drunk Jesse McCree?" is a question even Sombra finds herself asking.





	

_Or you can tell my lips to tell my fingertips_

_They won't be reaching out for you no more_

“Not again! How many quarters can you hide in those chaps, anyway, _vaquero?_ ” Sombra put her chipped glass down on the damp, sticky bar. She nodded at the barkeep to fill it up; just cranberry juice while she babysat this sad, scruffy shell of a man. Once he was out of her hair… she could practically taste the _reposado_ chilling in the bathtub back at the motel. She’d arrived in New Mexico a few days ago to put down some of _LumeriCo_ ’s grimier resurgences. Reyes contacted her that morning, asking to meet him here, but when she’d arrived, she found … this. They’d been parked in this dive for over three hours.

McCree was slumped against the jukebox, and batted at her weakly as she approached him, whiskey slopping out of the glass and spotting the metal of his arm. He was singing softly to his hat and he smelled _awful_ , like rotgut and sadness and rust. She leaned against the front of the jukebox, palm flat.  Old model, still took cash but all digital inside. Within seconds, Billy Ray Cyrus faded into blessed obscurity. In the silence, McCree put his arm over his face and sobbed. Perfect.

“Come on, _g_ _üey_ ,” she said, hoisting his free arm over her shoulder and muscling him into a booth. “Even in a place like this, you’re bringing the vibe down.” She downloaded the most recent newsfeeds from home, and reviewed them for mentions of herself while waiting for his sobs to taper off. With a snap of her fingers, she dismissed the feed and smiled at him, shark-like. “Better?”

“Why would he leave me?” he asked, with a raspy quality to his voice even The Reaper could be proud of. She stared at him, drink in midair, and closed her mouth before a fly could zip in. Or a snarky retort pop out. That was more likely, anyway. _“_ _¿Por qu_ _é?”_ he tried again.

“I understood you the first time, you idiot.” Sombra pressed her palms into her eyes, trying to ease a growing headache. Where the fuck was Reyes? “Joel, I’m sorry about Shimada. I am. But asking me for relationship advice is tossing water into the ocean.”

“Can’t you guess?”

The drunker he got, the more his drawl slipped, revealing the educated Harvard man he was. Sombra downloaded the day’s agony aunt columns for help, and listed off the obvious reasons. “You’re drunk. You reek of desperation. You hang out with bad company - _su servidora_ excluded, of course. Your greatest ambition in life is to visit the Alamo.”

“Whoa! I did that last year. Guess you haven’t been reading my online journal.”

“You call a blog an ‘online journal’,” she added, but pulled up his blog anyway anyway. “Your next greatest ambition is… to meet Dolly Parton? She died over ten years ago. They do have a lovely omnic replica of her at Dollyworld, though.  So I heard. From a friend.”

McCree crooked his fingers into air quotes, the effect muted by his sticky robotics jamming up, and lapsed into a sullen silence, which suited Sombra just fine. She checked the clock, first by the bar, and then her own internal one when the former reported that barely ten minutes had passed. Reyes was in for _such_ a biotic field hack when he finally showed up. McCree drifted into a doze, so she slipped out of the booth and onto a cracked and peeling vinyl barstool to rescue her abandoned cranberry juice.

“You should have cut him off hours ago,” she said to the bartender. “No respect for the law.”

“What respect do you have for the law?” he said, giving up the pretense of wiping down the bar and leaned forward on his elbows. He had a wide mouth and dark eyebrows, lots of laugh lines around the eyes that were overshadowed by deeper lines of grief around his mouth and nose. Handsome enough in a rough country way – if that was your thing. Sombra’s tastes were much more refined, elegant… French. “My sister came home last night.  I don’t know what you did, but thank you.”

“ _De nada,”_ she said. “Anything that hurts _Lum_ _ériCo_ helps me and my… friends.”

“Mmm. You have interesting friends.” He slid a new glass of cranberry juice her way.

“Him? He’s not a friend. More like a burden.” She toasted him in thanks before taking a tart sip and passed a business card over the countertop. “Anyway, if Guillermo tries to pull anything like that again with the women here, get in touch with me. This is my town, and if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay away.”

“You’ve never been here before this week. I’d bet my life savings on it.  You tend to stand out,” he said, turning the card over in his hands. “This is blank.”

Sombra hated to preen, but didn’t stop her cybernetics from blooming a bit brighter from the compliment, though her voice was low and earnest when she replied. “Not to the right people. Scan it with your phone and I’ll get the message. Anything the web touches is mine, and even places like this get the internet.” The hair rippled on the nape of her neck. “Speaking of webs…”

“How do you always know?” Amélie said. She was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed, dressed down for the occasion in a black cowl sweater and leggings.

“The nearest person’s jaw always comes unhinged when you arrive, _sirenita._ ” The scowl that crossed Amélie’s face made Sombra laugh. “Reyes not with you?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well he was nearby. The particle field that made up Gabriel’s semi-corporeal form played havoc with Sombra’s cybernetics but she could – and frequently did – torment him with little pranks.

“Sombra…” The growl caused McCree to start upright from his doze. His hat tumbled off, revealing lank, unwashed hair. “What did you do to my guns? I can’t unlock the safety.” Reyes’ broad-shouldered form shadowed the doorway behind Amélie, a dark baseball cap pulled down low to hide his eyes. Like Amélie, he was dressed for a low-profile outing; dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt, black cargo pants tucked into work boots.

“ _Ay, g_ _üey._ Why do you need those things, anyway? We’re all friends here.” The bartender’s open, congenial manner slipped off like a sad cowboy’s hat as he mumbled the day’s specials to Reyes and Amélie, picking up a stack of menus. Sombra waved him away. Instead, she sent the kitchen terminal an order for fried eggs and hash browns for McCree, and coffee for all four of them. Under Special Instructions, she wrote: _Bring food but stay in kitchen after. Don’t talk._ After a pause, she added: _Extra cream for coffee._

She greeted them both; Amélie with twin air kisses, her lips close enough to feel the chill coming off her skin, and Reyes with a friendly shove into the booth McCree occupied. Her own cheeks tingled where Amélie returned the gesture, the barest brush of contact. Reyes slammed the shotguns down on the dingy tabletop, cracking a Formica chip off the edge. “Fix them. Now.”

“Not before we have a nice long chat about how you stuck me with babysitting duty,” she replied.

“Can you at least acknowledge I’m sitting right here?” McCree grumbled, drawl returning in full force. Amélie perched on the edge of the booth like a swan ready to take flight. Sombra’s first and last encounter with a swan was vaulting a lot’s fence and landing in the middle of a migratory herd while on the run from some _Lum_ _ériCo_ goons. The force of the blows from their wings had given her a fearsome black eye, and nearly broken her left cheekbone. She held them in cautious respect after that. McCree and Amélie had some tense history, that much was certain, but Blackwatch records were some of the only ones she didn’t have access to – mostly because they were stored offline. Sombra thought it likely they had been torched entirely long before she entered the picture.

Gabe was stiff as a board, but that was less to do with his Blackwatch past with the two of them than it was about The Reaper. It was just a mask he wore, crafted from thin layers of anti-hero personas scavenged from old films, glued with rage hardened by time into lacquer.

“Fine, James,” Sombra said. “Why did we get stuck with you, here? At Christmas, no less.”

“Isn’t his name Jesse?” Amélie asked, torturing the final syllable with her strong accent, while Reyes had the nerve to say “Don’t tell me you had plans,” at the same time.

“She damn well knows what my name is,” McCree said, voice exhausted from drinking or crying, or from the stretch when he did both at the same time for about forty-five minutes. Sombra remembered it because she’d ordered Hank Williams Jr. over a dozen times on the jukebox before he finally noticed. He was _pissed_ but angry was much better than sobbing. She could handle angry. It lasted less than 20 minutes, at which point he discovered “Achy Breaky Heart” on the machine, and began howling along with the song like a dog whose master died.

The coffee and food arrived then, and he dug into the breakfast platter rather than answer her question. The coffee came with extra cream just like she asked, but…

“This tastes like dirt,” she said.

“I coulda told you that,” McCree said around a mouthful of fried egg and toast.

“I invited him,” Amélie said. “It was my idea.”

She examined Amélie’s profile, as the sniper turned her face away from everyone at the table. Her collarbones dipped below the neckline of her sweater, and Sombra longed to trace the veins beneath the cold, pale skin like circuitry with her fingertips. “You don’t even like Jeremy.”

“Christmas is complicated, _n’est-ce pas?_ When you’re alone.”

Of course. Gérard LaCroix was assassinated on Christmas Eve. By his wife, who was sitting across from Sombra now, looking cool, if not precisely composed, for the very people she sat with now. For all Sombra knew, Gabe was the one to give the order to use Amélie to get to Gérard. It seemed damned unlikely, though. He was a simple guy at heart, preferring to solve things one on one. With bullets.

 “We all know about Shimada,” Amélie said to McCree, looking him in the eye for the first time that evening. “Isn’t this better than drinking alone in the dark, with only the television for company?”

What an oddly specific scenario. “You could’ve done the courtesy of arriving on time, rather than sticking me with her,” he said sourly, nodding at Sombra.

“Now who’s talking about who like they’re not there?” Sombra replied, offhandedly skimming the major news network feeds. Ah, there. Shimada Hanzo, hair greying the way Shimada did everything – gracefully. He looked good; dressed for the 21st century for a change, in a leather jacket and soft, worn jeans, and most attractive of all, a warm smile, directed at the man he was dining with. He was celebrating a romantic Christmas with the CEO of a fast-growing cybernetic company, a skinny librarian of a man with stylish glasses perched at the end of his nose. Sombra recalled the name now. Itō Gentaro was something of a hot ticket item on the gossip rag scene for heading up the only publically traded company dealing in cybernetics. Whatever he was doing, it was working – he was filthy rich, and that was just the bank accounts she could find quickly. She could see the appeal. For all Shimada denounced his _yakuza_ past, it drove him more often than he would admit. Power, money and nicely cut suits were familiar.  They were comfortable.  They were security. Yes, she could see the appeal – if she didn’t know how easily all those threads could be cut by someone like her. If Itō or his company stepped out of line, Sombra would wield the scissors herself.

An orange alert popped up in the corner of her vision. She held up a manicured hand to stop McCree telling the story of how Shimada had dumped him – over email! – for the third time that night. “Did you two use my traffic light transponder to get here?”

“No,” said Gabe. “I wasn’t in any hurry to bail you out.”

“ _Mierda,_ ” she said. Traffic enforcement cam feeds showed a series of sleek, black cars staggered along the interstate. Mercedes-Benz. _Very_ subtle. Despite the rapidly dropping temperatures as night wore on, one of the drivers rolled down the window to rest a muscled forearm, a thickly inked “512” curving round the bicep.  “Katya. Time to go.”

“Volskaya?” McCree asked. “Katya Volskaya? What does Volskaya Industries want in New Mexico?”

“We made her acquaintance recently, and she was less than impressed,” Sombra said. “Amélie tried to shoot her in the head.”

“Aw, heck, that’s just how she says hello,” he muttered as Amélie hustled him out of the booth. He staggered, and with a wrinkled nose, she offered a shoulder to haul him to his feet. Between her height and her heels, he dangled like a puppet.

“Guess she took it personally.”

Reyes snatched his weapons off the table. The guns made twin chirps when he laid his finger along the triggers. “The safeties, Sombra?”

“Not till we’re in the car. This diner’s been through enough without you blasting it to pieces.” She threw an unlocked credit card onto the bar. “This should cover our tab. Remember: we were never here.” On her way out, she heard the bartender cursing as the lights and computers went dead, courtesy of a minor EMP blast.

Outside, Reyes was standing in the lot, gritting his teeth. She groaned. “Please don’t tell me you parked next to the door, _g_ _üey_.”

“Battery’s dead.”

Aside from the car Gabe and Amélie arrived in, the only other vehicle far enough away from the building was a white pick-up truck coated with reddish road dust. A smartass had scrawled “clean me” on the side of the truck bed along with an artistic rendition of a smiling penis. Amélie looked at Sombra, one shoulder slipping out of her cowl neck in a shrug, and hauled open the door, pulling a small kit out of her bra. She jacked the car with practiced ease while Reyes slung her rifle and their bags out of the trunk of their former car. It rumbled to life as he boosted McCree into the bed of the truck.

“Push over, _sirenita_ ,” Sombra said. “I’ll drive. Get your gun.”

“You want me to aim a sniper rifle, while you drive _un tas de merde_ down a dirt road, in the dark?” Amélie arched her brow at Sombra, and clambered over the console to the passenger side. Sombra slid open the panel between the cab and bed of the truck, so Gabe could pass the rifle in.

“It’s okay if you can’t do it.” Sombra peeled out of the parking lot. 

“Child’s play.” Amélie twisted in her seat, pushing the flimsy headrest off its pins to lie on the floor.  She braced the rifle between her shoulder and the open back window.  “ _Allons-y._ ” Thumping noises came from the back.

“Sombra. My guns?”

“¡ _No manches!_ ” She flicked her eyes to the left to de-activate the block on Reyes’ shotguns, adding her own special twist. A pleasantly robotic voice drifted through the open window: “¿ _Que onda, g_ _üey?_ ”

“Sombra…”

Without taking her gaze from the silencer she was threading on, Amélie muttered to herself, “What’s up, dude?” in a mangled California surfer voice.

“ _Ay_ , not bad, _sirenita._ You’re no Johnny Utah, but give it time.”

GPS indicated they could take a straight cut across five miles of desert to circle behind Volskaya’s team, and head off scot free to celebrate Christmas morning out West somewhere, but she was certain the stretch of land was criss-crossed with ravines and gullies.  Safer to play hide and seek on the roads, at least until dawn.

They rattled through the darkness in silence for a few minutes. Sombra navigated the unlit roads with a combination of night vision and GPS, sparing the barest attention to navigational tracking and omnic registries to try and pinpoint the Volskaya convoy’s location, when Amélie exhaled through her teeth. “ _Voil_ _à…”_

The landscape in the review mirrors was black on black on black, but moments after the muffled pop of the rifle, a brief bright spray of returning fire illuminated another car, closer behind than Sombra would’ve liked. One of them ricocheted off the side mirror, whining like an angry bee past the open window into the desert darkness. “Zaryanova’s driving,” she said through the back. “She won’t have that beast of a cannon with her.”

“You really wanna bet on that?” McCree shouted through the window.

“The pilot light on the cannon would give away their position too readily,” Sombra added.

Beside her, Amélie shifted minutely, seeking a clear shot. The truck rocked suddenly to the left, and the rifle slid off the back of the seat, clanging against the rim of the open back window. “ _Maudit connard!”_

“Reyes jumped off,” McCree said through the window.

“Damnit!”

“Don’t worry about me, I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

“I risk hitting Gabriel if I shoot now,” said Amélie.

“It would serve him right.” Sombra gritted her teeth, and pulled off the road. “If you get a clear shot, take it, no matter what.” She hopped out before the truck rolled to a stop, landing with one hand for balance. “Up and at ‘em _vaquero_ , I need another set of hands out here.”

“A firefight?” McCree slid off the truck bed, looking perkier at the prospect than he had any right to be.

She snorted. “Sure thing, _g_ _üey._ You and your six-shooter versus Zaryanova and the best goons Volskaya money can buy. Make a great obituary for Shimada to read later.” She popped a spool of hair-thin wire out of her gauntlet. “Or you can anchor this on the other side of the road and we get the hell out of here. Tree, rock, anything that will hold up long enough to work.”

“How long?” A series of pops in the distance, marked by flares of gunpowder as The Reaper landed amid the Volskaya cars. There was a loud squeal of metal on metal, punctuated with angry Russian shouts.

“Ten seconds, max.”

He whistled through his teeth as another flash from Amélie’s rifle briefly lit up the area around them. “You always have the best toys.”

A few feet from the truck, Sombra found a small, determined looking cactus clinging to a rock. She anchored the translocation device to the rock, and quickly attached the other end of the wire. McCree was still working when she was done, Amélie kneeling next to him to take another shot. In the distance, a gout of flame lit up the horizon as a car flipped over into the scrub. “Nice shot.”

“They always are,” Amélie replied, before a cloud of dust billowed up around her ankles. She grunted in surprise and lashed out with the butt of her gun. Gabe’s forearm blocked the blow with a dull thud.

“Time to go,” he growled.

“Are you joining us? How nice.”

“One car still mobile. Time to _go._ ”

“Zaryanova?” Sombra had to admit to herself she would be sad to lose a rival like Aleksandra. Such tenacity! Such loyalty! What must it be like to command that kind of strength? How would Zarya feel about her beloved Katya if she knew Volskaya was in bed with omnics? She couldn’t wait to find out.

“Alive. For now.”

“You drive. I’ll take care of them.” McCree claimed shotgun on account of riding in the back gave him motion sickness. In theory, the cab had a second row of seats, so Sombra and Amélie got cozy in the back. Amid the tangle of knees, Sombra brought the translocator online, setting the field for bioforms above a certain weight threshold. Even with the limitations, there would be backlash. “Faster would be better _._ ”

“You want fast, or you want upright?” Reyes replied, bent over the wheel.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, _g_ _üey._ ”

A brilliant bubble of light exploded out of the ground behind them. It expanded with a dizzying speed, rocking the old truck back and forth on tortured shocks. Sombra twisted in her seat to watch the black Mercedes get taken apart piece by piece. Last to go was Zaryanova, face twisted in a grimace of agony.  Translocation was not a pretty process at the best of times. For the uninitiated, it was like molten fire being poured between their atoms and erupting into millions of volcanic bursts. The bubble shrunk to a pin-point, a cracking boom rolling across the scrub as the vacuum collapsed into itself.

“Where are they now?” Amélie asked in the aftermath’s hush.

“Hell, for all I care,” Sombra replied. “Or Australia, which is pretty much the same thing, don’t you think?” It served her purpose either way. Katya would think twice about betraying her friends. In order to be crystal clear about her irritation, Sombra lifted half a million dollars from one of the offshore Volskaya dummy companies. “You guys want to party for the holidays?”

“Aw, what the hell, I’m practically sober,” McCree said. “I’m in. You have a side of the Rio Grande in mind?”

“Anywhere that serves a good _reposado_ is fine with me. Reyes owes me at least two doubles. Tequila squared.” She met Amélie’s eyes, barely a foot away, shining in the dim cab. “How about you, _sirenita?_ No one should be alone for the holidays.”

“This isn’t what I had in mind,” she said.

“But it’s what you’ve got.”

“A good fight followed by a good drink. What could be better?” McCree whooped from the front seat.

Cold fingers reached out and squeezed her hand in the dark. “It’s perfect,” Amélie said, for Sombra’s ears only.

Who knew? Maybe by this time next year, she’ll have convinced Zaryanova to join them. Humming, she tweaked Gabe’s shotguns to play a little festive music for them. His irritation and their laughter carried them all the way the border, and the rising light of Christmas dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> i freakin love writing Sombra. (don't worry, zarya lives!)


End file.
